On Trinity Sunday, 13 June 1824, he was ordained deacon, and became curate of St. Clement's Church, Oxford, when he did much hard parish work. He preached his first sermon on 23 June at Warton, from the text, ‘Man goeth forth to his work and to his labour until the evening.’ His last sermon, as an Anglican clergyman, was preached nineteen years later from the same text. During his early residence at Oriel he associated much with Edward Hawkins (1789–1882) [q.v.] , then fellow of the college and vicar of St. Mary's, who did much to ‘root out evangelical doctrines from his creed.’ In 1824 he contributed to the ‘Encyclopædia Metropolitana’ an article on Cicero and a ‘Life of Apollonius of Tyana.’ In March 1825 he was appointed vice-principal of Alban Hall by the principal, Dr. Whately, with whom he was at the time in close and constant intercourse. His relations with Whately largely cured him of the extreme shyness that was natural to him. Newman says that he owed more to Whately than to any one else in the way of mental improvement, and that he derived from him ‘the idea of the Christian Church as a Divine appointment, and as a substantive body, independent of the State, and endowed with rights, prerogatives, and powers of its own.’ He had a large share in the composition of Whately's ‘Logic,’ as is testified in the preface to that work. He resigned his appointment of vice-principal of St. Alban Hall on becoming tutor of Oriel in 1826. He felt, as he wrote to his mother, that he had ‘a great undertaking in the tutorship;’ that ‘there was always a danger of the love of literary pursuits assuming too prominent a place in the thoughts of a college tutor, or of his viewing his situation merely as a secular office.’ In the same year Richard Hurrell Froude [q. v.] was elected fellow of Oriel, a friend whose influence Newman felt ‘powerful beyond all others to which he had been subjected,’ and whom he described as ‘one of the acutest and cleverest and deepest men in the memory of man.’ In this year, too, he contributed his ‘Essay on Miracles’ to the ‘Encyclopædia Metropolitana.’ In 1827 he was appointed by William Howley [q. v.], then bishop of London, one of the preachers at Whitehall. In 1827–8 he was public examiner in classics in the final examination for honours.
In 1828 Hawkins was elected provost of Oriel, in preference to Keble, largely through Newman's influence. In vindication of his choice, Newman said laughingly that if they were electing an angel he would of course vote for Keble, but ‘the case was different’ (Liddon, Life of Pusey, i. 139). Pusey afterwards regretted the election, but ‘without it,’ wrote Newman many years later, ‘there would have been no Movement, no Tracts, no Library of the Fathers’ (ib.) On succeeding to the provostship, Hawkins vacated the vicarage of St. Mary's, the university church, and Newman was presented by his college to the vacant living. In February 1829 he strenuously opposed, on purely academical grounds, Peel's re-election as M.P. for the university, although he had hitherto petitioned annually in favour of catholic emancipation. A breach between himself and Whately followed (Apologia, pp. 72–3; Liddon, Life of Pusey, i. 198), and his association with Keble and Froude gradually grew closer. It was at this time that he began systematically to read the fathers, with a view to writing a history of the principal councils, a design that resulted in his ‘Arians of the Fourth Century’ (Apologia, p. 87). In 1830 he served as pro-proctor. In the same year he was ‘turned out of the secretaryship of the Church Missionary Society at Oxford,’ because of a pamphlet which he had written expressive of his dissatisfaction with its constitution. He thought there was no principle recognised by it on which churchmen could take their stand. This marks his definitive breach with the evangelical party, shreds and tatters of whose doctrine had up to this time hung about him. He found, as he expressed it, that ‘Calvinism was not a key to the phenomena of human nature, as they occur in the world.’ He adds that ‘the Evangelical teaching, considered as a system and in what was peculiar to itself, failed to find a response in his own religious experience, or afterwards in his parochial.’ In 1831–2 he was one of the select university preachers. This may be called the last step in his public career at Oxford. In 1829 differences had sprung up between himself and the provost of Oriel regarding the duties and responsibilities attaching to his tutorship. He considered the office as of a ‘substantially religious nature,’ which Hawkins did not. The immediate occasion of the disagreement was ‘a claim of the tutors to use their own discretion in the arrangement of the ordinary terminal lecture table.’ Hurrell Froude and Wilberforce supported Newman. But in the struggle which ensued the provost won the victory, and the opposing tutors in 1832 had to resign their posts in the college (Mozley, Reminiscences, i. 229–38).
‘Humanly speaking,’ Newman afterwards wrote, ‘the Oxford Movement never would have been had Newman not been deprived of his tutorship, or had Keble, not Hawkins, been provost.’ In December 1832 Newman
